In the halls of academia researchers are often more concerned about protecting their intellectual property than publishing the truth. Blogging offers a way to respect previous research, mine the information glut, and quickly publish the results. This blog is an experiment in gathering, documenting, associating, and presenting important information about human evolution using only a browser, the internet, and copy/paste techniques. These are not "my" words. I am only the editor.

About Me

I have a BS degree in Wildlife from O.S.U. but most of my education comes from self study. I don't watch much TV because I don't think subjecting myself to all the materialistic and social propaganda is healthy. You can't view the world clearly if you put blinders on.
My conclusions about the literature I cite on this website will be confined to the comments section. Please read those comments if you want to see the insights I have gained from my personal study. An interesting thing happened when I began this experiment. I discovered that bolding the important points of the research I was citing produced a rough summary of the information I could scan quickly, and also provided a easily referenced outline I could use to associate data from different sources using multiple browser windows. This led to a number of personal insights. Learning how to use blogs to data mine effectively can contribute greatly to the spread of global knowledge, and reduce the "information glut" that has accumulated.

Saturday, February 12, 2005

"A University of Utah study showing how lice evolved with the people they infested reveals that a now-extinct species of early human came into direct contact with our species about 25,000 years ago and spread the parasites to our ancestors."

"The study found modern humans have two genetically distinct types of head lice. One type is found worldwide and evolved on the ancestors of our species, Homo sapiens. The second type is found only in the Americas, evolved on another early human species (possibly Homo erectus) and jumped to Homo sapiens during fights, sex, sharing of clothes or perhaps cannibalism."

"Alan Rogers, a co-author of the study and professor of anthropology at the University of Utah, says: “The record of our past is written in our parasites.” The analysis of lice genes also confirmed two other key developments in human evolution. First, it verified studies showing how and when various species branched off the family tree of primates and humans. Second, it confirmed the “out of Africa” theory that the population of Homo sapiens mushroomed after a small band of the early humans left Africa sometime between 150,000 and 50,000 years ago."

"Transmission of the second type of lice from a now-extinct human species to Homo sapiens may have happened during mating, so Reed plans a study of pubic or crab lice – which only spread sexually – to confirm or disprove that possibility. Clayton says evidence of contact between two species of humans is surprising because “Homo erectus has long been thought to have gone extinct hundreds of thousands of years ago,” although recent studies suggested Homo sapiens might have had contact with Homo erectus in Asia 50,000 years ago."

"Reed says: “Not only did modern humans live contemporaneously with close cousins such as Neanderthals, but also with more archaic hominids such as Homo erectus, a species that we have not shared a common ancestor with for over a million years. Reed wonders if contact with our species proved fatal."

“When scientists first determined that we (Homo sapiens) were contemporaneous with Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) in Europe, it was suspicious that our contact with them immediately preceded their extinction,” Reed says. “Our study has provided evidence that we had contact with Homo erectus in Asia just prior to the extinction of that species as well. Did we cause the extinction of two other species of humans?”

"The researchers found the family tree of the lice closely mirrors the previously published family tree of humans and their primate ancestors. That was consistent with the well-known phenomenon that any single species or lineage of lice (like other parasites) tends to stick only to one species of host and rarely jumps to other hosts."

"Some of the findings conflict with two major theories of human evolution – the “replacement model” and “multiregional model” and instead fit best with a third theory known as the “diffusion wave model.”

"(1) The replacement model says that after primitive human ancestors first left Africa about 2 million years ago, a second wave spread out from Africa sometime after 150,000 years ago and certainly by 50,000 years ago, and then replaced other now-extinct species of early humans in Africa, Asia and Europe without breeding with them."

"Clayton says that model doesn’t fit the louse data because if Homo sapiens from Africa replaced archaic humans elsewhere without interacting with them, the type of lice on archaic humans would have gone extinct with their hosts instead of jumping to modern humans."

"(2) The multiregional model says early humans from Africa and elsewhere in the world mated with other each other, so Homo sapiens gradually evolved in many regions worldwide. But if so much interbreeding occurred, the two groups of lice probably would not have remained genetically distinct for the last 1.18 million years, Rogers says."

"(3) The diffusion wave model falls between the other two theories. Like the replacement theory, it says modern humans arose in Africa and spread across the world, Rogers says. Like the multiregional theory, it says those early humans mated with humans elsewhere. The diffusion wave theory adds a new twist, namely, that the genes of humans spreading from Africa came to dominate the modern human genetic blueprint because when they mated with archaic humans, the children were less fit."

"The new study confirmed several events in primate and human evolution. The researchers found chimp lice and human lice diverged roughly 5.6 million years ago, consistent with previous evidence that chimps and human ancestors diverged from a common ancestor about 5.5 million years ago."

"The study also supports the controversial view that there was a “bottleneck” or reduction in the global Homo sapiens population to only about 10,000 people about 100,000 to 50,000 years ago. Rogers and others have proposed the bottleneck may have occurred because of a mass die-off of early humans due to a globally catastrophic volcanic eruption. Others believe the population bottleneck seen in human genes happened because only a small group of human ancestors left Africa in the second wave 150,000 to 50,000 years ago,"

"The new study used the mutation rate in lice and comparisons of genetic differences among lice to find a similar population bottleneck in the group of head lice that infested early Homo sapiens, but no such bottleneck in the population of the lice on the archaic human species. That means archaic humans didn’t go through the same population shrinkage and thus must have spread their lice to Homo sapiens sometime after 50,000 years ago. Rogers speculates contact occurred 25,000 or 30,000 years ago."

"The findings provide independent confirmation of the second “out of Africa” event because genetic analysis shows the population of lice – like their Homo sapiens hosts – also dramatically expanded after the bottleneck."

3 Comments:

I love this particular study because it illustrates the power of genetics and comparison research, especially on organisms like parasites that tend to live exclusively on one host. If we can learn this much from one human parasite, imagine what we could learn by comparing the genetic histories of all the human parasites? We may finally be able to fill in all the gaps in our human history.

We are already beginning to see a complex evolutionary history that involved multiple migrations and extinctions, with populations diverging and converging all over the planet. Groups of "people" from both major migrations out of Africa lived concurrently, yet didn't share a common ancestor for over a million years. I think that is amazing!

There is evidence now that suggests these vastly different groups did interbreed but the offspring were less "fit", and the association with our human line eventually exterminated the earlier humans.

It is also possible that our human ancestors intentionally killed off the other less human species they encountered. We were developing much faster than they were, and had developed a taste for meat already. With our larger size, greater intelligence, and new weapons for hunting, it would have been an easy task to murder the more passive matriarchal clans, steal their women, and eat their men.

Considering how aggressive modern men have been in our bloody recorded history, it seems unlikely that our ancestral males were less aggressive.

Seems to me this sort of parallel species research should become a priority, since it offers so much potential. Imagine a complex history of a group of species based on their parasitic relationships, or even their symbiotic relationships? I would think that any type of close one to one relationship would yield useful information.

I've read that the cross between the more modern breed of humans with the older types, produced less "fit" offsprings. I'll see if I can find any supporting evidence for that or not.